Students are expected to actively and passionately participate in this course. This means more than showing up and turning things in on time⁠—which should be a given. Beyond that baseline students should be curious, prepared, thoughtful, vocal, and intentional throughout the course. They should make us understand why they are here, and demonstrate to us that they care about themselves, their work, and each other⁠—and ultimately, about this chosen profession.

This engagement will be unavoidably reflected in the quality of students’ work⁠—but we also evaluate this discretely based on their participation in and out of the classroom, with us and with their peers.

Each unit begins with a set of readings to introduce the subject. Students are expected to read the required selections and synthesize their thoughts in a written response, prior to the next class. We are not looking for summarization, here⁠—these should be personal reflections on the subjects, and are evaluated with this lens. We will then discuss these readings as a group.

The bulk of the work for this class takes the form of projects. They are intended as opportunities for students to demonstrate the knowledge and skills learned in class while developing their own practice, and are evaluated in this light.

There will be check-ins and reviews around each of these before the final due dates, when we will have critiques as a group. In addition to the quality of the project itself, students will be subject to an in-person code review and will also be assessed on the presentation of their work. More specific evaluation criteria will be delineated with each project’s introduction.

This agreement is intended to help us create and maintain a safe, empathetic, and productive space for our course. It is built on trust and accumulated experience across cohorts. It can be revised and modified, with all of our input, over the year:

• Classmates should use our preferred names and pronouns.

• We will have a short break, roughly halfway through the class.

• The class should feel comfortable asking the instructors anything⁠—nothing is too trivial, or embarrassing, or off-topic. Tangents are good! Students can always ask us via Slack, if they would like to remain anonymous.

• When presenting, students will “have the floor” while they take us through their work. This means everyone else will be quiet, we’ll close our laptops/​turn off our phones, and give our full attention to the person showing their work.

• Likewise for when the instructors are presenting new material⁠—no laptops, no phones. If students require either for assisting their learning, they must request approval beforehand. Our default setting should be “full attention, up front.”

• We will all engage meaningfully with presented work and try to give constructive feedback (no fluff).

• For Fall semester, we’re not going to use LLM agents/​autocomplete (“artificial intelligence”), nor traditional copy/​pasting, nor any other tools where we do not write our own code. We will talk through appropriate, allowed use of these technologies in the Spring.

• We will always attribute our work when referencing others, tools, or examples.

Our intent is to respect and give forum to a range of perspectives and backgrounds, including culture, race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, disability, and age. In instances where we are personally not qualified to speak from a specific perspective, students are encouraged to explore this area themselves. And please let us know if there are ways that the course can better serve these goals.

We will have limited availability outside of our class time, and won’t keep scheduled “office hours.” Students should not expect us to immediately solve specific design or technical problems, or have their progress be blocked by this. Their first resource should be themselves, then our course site and its materials, and then each other.

That said: if there are still questions⁠—particularly logistical or content ones⁠—students can message us on Slack, and we will respond when we can. But again this should never be a bottleneck; all of this works better when not done at the last minute.

Students may find code similar to our exercises or projects elsewhere online. But the copying or adapting of any code beyond our provided course material (lectures, exercises, demos), without attribution, is not allowed under any circumstances. This includes from LLMs, more below.

If adapting, with attribution, students must explain the usage and demonstrate an understanding of how the code works. We will have in-person code reviews to facilitate and guage this understanding.

We have zero tolerance for any sort of plagiarism⁠—which ranges from “verbatim copying” (copying-and-pasting) to “thorough paraphrasing” (changing names or rearranging) and “autocompleting” (with LLM-assisted editors). Students should also review the Academic Integrity Policy.

An example:

				/* I wanted to treat large grids differently in my design! */
/* I found this tool: https://css-tip.com/quantity-queries/ */
/* The selector matches when the container has a sixth child. */
.container:has(> :nth-child(6)) {
	background-color: gold;
}

			

We will take recordings of our sessions for students to reference later. As these will include the students and their work, the recordings will be stored on our Google Drive and made available only to New School email users.